Women Are Becoming Better Prospects for Fund Raisers

Women worldwide have greater potential to give, in large part because they have more opportunities for education and are less likely to have children, Susan U. Raymond, a New York economist today told the annual meeting of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Ms. Raymond executive vice president at Changing Our World, a fund-raising consulting company, noted that a quarter of university graduates in the Middle East are now women. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of women workers in the United States didn’t graduate from high school, down from 34 percent in 1970.

Among other data Ms. Raymond used to show why it’s important to focus on women as potential donors:

* Control of wealth. Wealth controlled by women in the United States and Canada alone will grow 30 percent by 2014, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

The share of wealth controlled by women is growing rapidly in Asia and other parts of the globe, the company says. Women now control more than 50 percent of the wealth in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

* Women are building successful businesses. Forty-one percent of all American businesses are owned by women, and one in 11 American women owns her own business. “If these firms were a country,” said Ms. Raymond, “they would be right behind Germany in size.”

Yet despite the growing amount of wealth held by women, the picture is not entirely rosy. For example, even though women now make up half of all medical students in the United States and nearly a third of practicing physicians, they are still going into pediatrics, obstetrics, and other areas that pay less than male-dominated specialties such as neurosurgery or radiology.

Women also have yet to get plum positions in the business world. Women hold just 3 percent of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies and only 15 percent of board jobs.

When it comes to giving, few women are making the biggest charitable gifts on their own, she said. Her analysis of the 60 largest charitable gifts made in the United States in 2009 found that only a handful came from women who had made the gift on their own, not with a spouse.

To do a better job of reaching out to women who have the means to give, Ms. Raymond urged fund raisers to:

• Do research on the owners of small and midsize companies, especially those that are privately owned.
• Instead of doing research on individuals and potential corporate donors separately, combine them so you are looking at both individuals and the companies where these women are likely to be active at the executive and ownership level. The fact that a woman is also the owner of a privately held company might not show up on other records.
• Read local news for information about prominent women who are movers and shakers in the local Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, and other organizations. “You won’t find this information in The New York Times,” said Ms. Raymond.
• Don’t limit solicitations to “old ladies with money.” Because good health care is extending the lives of men, many couples are making joint decisions about giving until the end of their lives.